Blog Archives

Wandering around Brixton London the other night it was great to see independent stores thinking about how they can improve the look of the high st. Lots of stores there has decorated their shutters turning them into works of art and helping to make the street look interesting and not like a ghetto. I hope more stores do this and turn our streets into living art galleries.

Usually when we think of GIFs, we think about something on a small scale that is relegated to the web. Many would argue an essential quality of the ‘art form’ is its smile file size, which is considered by some to be a constraint that must be worked within. So, what happens when you make a GIF the size of a building?

Artist and designer INSA has developed a new brand of street art merging the digital art form with graffiti – or what they cleverly call “GIF-ITTI.” The moving images are created by choosing a building surface which they paint over several times, photographing each stage of the process. The stills are then sequenced into a GIF proper bringing the Graffiti to life online. Street art becomes a kind of interventionist animation. These GIFs in particular were done in collaboration with street artist UNGA and the Broken Fingaz Crew.

The GIF is transformed from a discrete object into a new form of art and street documentation as well as a work of art in and of itself. While most often GIFs are made from pre-existing footage or materials what’s most fascinating about these is that the artists intervened in a public, physical space to generate a GIF as the final product. Real space is transformed in service of the digital world.

Those of us who have visual minds find that although we dream in color, there is one fact that is inherently black and white. We are cursed to picture things in our mind that we would rather not – but on the flip-side we are blessed to have the ability to envision a draft-worthy product before we even have the materials ready to sketch. Some visual-minded individuals, like Nikita Nomerz of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, are blessed to see things that do not exist, and have the ability to bring them to life. Nomerz has brilliantly personified a collection of towers, dilapidated buildings, and deteriorating urban spaces by forcing us all to see what he sees.